Games: Day of the Thing

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The rules to Day of the Thing are available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence.
  1.  # 1
    I worry that the Things can become too powerful. If a Thing knows where the equipment is kept (which might happen if a scientist becomes a Thing), they can just tear up every Radio part.

    Comment originally posted by Asher Stuhlman on 9 August 2008 [?]When we replaced the wiki talk pages with a forum, we manually copied all the old comments across, so they wouldn't get lost. This is one of them.
  2.  # 2
    I agree. Seems like the "exponential" growth of the Things will make things too easy for them.

    Also, an idea for a final phase of the game: once the radio is built, only 4 scientists can fit in the rescue helicopter. Scientists have to decide who gets to go in the copter to warn civilization. If 2 or more scientists are actually the Thing, then the Scientists still lose. (To give more incentive for Things to be sneaky in late game.)

    Comment originally posted by Robert Yang on 10 August 2008 [?]When we replaced the wiki talk pages with a forum, we manually copied all the old comments across, so they wouldn't get lost. This is one of them.
  3.  # 3
    Ah, although this got lost slightly in the writeup, I was imagining that "the laboratory" would be a single room known to all the players. So everyone would know where the radio was being built.

    Perhaps it just needs a rule making machinery cards indestructable - a Thing would have to grab the cards and run, rather than tearing them up, which would give away their identity, and let the scientists give chase.

    A helicopter endgame might be good - I was originally going to reuse an endgame mechanic from another Thing game I made (http://kevan.org/games/things.html - the scientists only win if they can identify all the Things), but felt that actually building the radio was probably difficult enough. Picking four seems like a good compromise - I'll certainly keep it in-hand for playtesting, if it turns out that the radio is really easy to build. It might make for a good "major victory / minor victory" ending.

    Comment originally posted by Kevan on 10 August 2008 [?]When we replaced the wiki talk pages with a forum, we manually copied all the old comments across, so they wouldn't get lost. This is one of them.
  4.  # 4
    This game looks great - can't wait to play it!

    Comment originally posted by Alex Fleetwood on 10 September 2008 [?]When we replaced the wiki talk pages with a forum, we manually copied all the old comments across, so they wouldn't get lost. This is one of them.
  5.  # 5
    In case anyone's reading this but not the events page, I'll be playtesting this game at Sandpit #7 on October the 29th. Given that it's nearly hallowe'en, I'll be rebranding it as Night of the Vampire, and making some tweaks to the cards.

    Comment originally posted by Kevan on 10 October 2008 [?]When we replaced the wiki talk pages with a forum, we manually copied all the old comments across, so they wouldn't get lost. This is one of them.
  6.  # 6
    Big changes as a result of playtesting - collected "radio" cards were handed over to the game moderator, so there was no scope for a Thing player to steal them (and no need for an actual, bored player to have to stand around guarding them). Exponential infection did turn out to be a problem on the night, and this has now been fixed by giving the Thing players a limited number of "Infection" cards, which they have to use up to infect people.

    For the record, the good guys only collected four of the "coffin nail" cards, in Night of the Vampire, and the game ended with all but one player infected, all of them milling around outside the churchyard's only entrance. There was a lot of good drama before it hit that point, though - in the early game, two separate groups of five or six players slowed their approach to one another along a street, before both deciding to flee. And the two vampires (who'd each been slipped notes giving the other's identity) were brazenly chatting by themselves right outside the churchyard in the opening minutes, with nobody (apparently) suspecting them.

    Comment originally posted by Kevan on 4 November 2008 [?]When we replaced the wiki talk pages with a forum, we manually copied all the old comments across, so they wouldn't get lost. This is one of them.
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      CommentAuthorGuest
    • CommentTimeApr 16th 2009
     # 7
    We ran this as "Night of the vampire" as a game in youth movement (10 12-14 year olds + 3 adults + game moderator) which worked pretty well. It was slightly re-themed to make the search for cart parts ("you want to escape from Count Dracula's castle but the cart has been sabotaged") instead of coffin nails. The group really enjoyed the game - while they are pretty passive usually and a bit reserved while I was explaining it, they played this with much enthusiasm and there were quite some discussions at the end.

    We used 2 starting vampires (one teen, one adult) with 4 cards each. By the end of the game, there were 8 vampires, 2 of which were killed, and a lot of holy water was wasted (one of the vampires claiming half of the stash at the start of the game). It ended up as a narrow victory for the vampires, with the humans missing 2 car parts to escape.

    All in all, a success.
  8.  # 8
    I just ran this game as a first day of class activity for 20 college students. Even though I did not identify the two initial Things to one another, they still absorbed all but one person in about twenty minutes. What I liked best was the relative silence of the game, which we played in a library.

    In the hot washup after the game, they all agreed that adding a couple of one-shot gun cards into the mix would have increased the drama.

    This is a good game.
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      CommentAuthorKevan
    • CommentTime2 days ago edited
     # 9
    Great to hear a game report, glad it went down well.

    You really need the limited number of infection cards to stop things getting out of control too quickly, and forcing the Thing to switch to tactical infections once they're running low on cards. (It might be interesting to somehow include a second wave of infection cards, though - either collected from the moderator if nobody else can see them, or a set of different-coloured infection cards which can only be used once a Thing has chosen to irrevocably reveal its true nature by wearing a bandanna or something.)

    The game had guns in an early design, but I decided against them - being eliminated from the game as an innocent human player seemed like it would be too frustrating. Would be interesting to see how it played out in practice, though, particularly with the players having to decide who gets the gun in the first place.

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